“The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” So said Barack Obama at the UN on September 25, 2012. Why did he say this? Because he was blaming a video about Muhammad for the murderous jihad attacks on September 11, 2012 in Benghazi. In that same speech, he called the video “crude and disgusting” and said: “I know there are some who ask why we don’t just ban such a video. And the answer is enshrined in our laws: Our Constitution protects the right to practice free speech.”
Yet this was just empty verbiage. Before he made that speech, the Obama White House asked Google to remove the Muhammad video from YouTube. Google refused on free speech grounds, although later a court ordered the video removed.
In those days, Obama never warned anyone “not [to] get into a pattern in which you’re intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks.”
But now the free speech case doesn’t have to do with outraged Muslims, and Obama is suddenly a champion of free expression. This isn’t about endangering people, either: the North Koreans are just as capable of going on a bloody rampage as Islamic jihadists are. For whatever reason, Obama shows a strange solicitude for the sensibilities of Muslims that he doesn’t appear interested in offering to the North Koreans.
“Obama: Sony ‘did the wrong thing’ when it pulled movie,” by Elizabeth Weise, Kevin Johnson and Andrea Mandell, USA Today, December 19, 2014:
WASHINGTON – Sony did the wrong thing when it backed down and pulled The Interview in the face of North Korean hacker threats, President Obama said at his new conference Friday.
“I wish they had spoken to me first,” he said. “I would have told them do not get into a pattern in which you’re intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks.”
But on the heels of Obama’s pointed comments, Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton gave his first television interview to CNN. “We have not caved. We have not given in. We have persevered,” he told Fareed Zakaria….